Last week I was sitting in Brian Hall’s office when the Yahoo/Google news was breaking. Who’s he? The guy at Microsoft who runs most of the non-search Windows Live stuff. You know, Hotmail, Messenger, Spaces, and a bunch of other stuff.

We filmed a little fun cell phone video, but our longer interview will be up sometime over next few weeks.

In that he told me what Microsoft is going to do now that the Yahoo deal fell through. He admitted that he was one of the guys working on that deal.

His number one weapon to use against Google?

The 320 million active users of Hotmail and Messenger. That’s 320 million people who have signed into these services in the past 30 days (which, by the way, is WAY up from when I worked at Microsoft - when I worked at Microsoft they were saying 150 to 200 million). Keep in mind that Facebook looks like they just passed 100 million users, so you can see that these are still very popular services.

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Time shifting is an honored tradition, being able to record TV shows is something that makes time shifting something that you want to do, unfortunately reports are coming in that NBC has started using the broadcast flag, and Vista is obeying it.

This screen cap is coming from justinjas, a blogger who was trying to record “American Gladiator” using his Vista PC. If this had been a regular old TV to Tape, he would not have had this problem, but since he was using Vista, the setting that NBC used “no allowed recording” kept him from time shifing his Television show to a time that he could have sat down and watched it. Justin states:

Since when did over the air NBC start putting broadcast flags on their programs. I don’t know if this is specific to my local station (WNCN) but this is the first time I’ve ever ran into this message. I can pause, rewind, fast foward (and still skip commercials) but no recording for viewing later. Thanks NBC. Source: Justinjas

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This article should probably start with the acknowledgement that ZDNet’s readers don’t represent the average person; a poll of them isn’t the best measure of America (or the world). Still, 48 percent of respondents in a ZDNet poll can see themselves running XP six years from now.

From Microsoft’s perspective, this is disastrous. Hardware failures and changes of heart may keep the stat from coming true, but regardless, the company’s obviously behind in public opinion. It’s as if people would let every aspect of their online and computer-related lives be slow and behind the times just to avoid Vista.

Also, the date of 2014 goes beyond when Windows 7 is due to be released. I’m just trying to make my six-year-old computer (which runs XP) last through that launch; about 2,090 ZDNet respondents seem ready to let it pass, too.

At that rate, it’s hard to believe they’re not considering Macs or Linux as eventual alternatives. People don’t collect operating systems like classic cars, and sticking with XP shouldn’t be taken as a sign of love for Windows or Microsoft.

Hopefully the ZDNet poll will get enough attention within Microsoft that the company will dedicate more time and money to addressing certain issues and winning back a following.

In the world of hacking and mass defacements, Linux is being hacked more often than Microsoft Windows, according to Zone H.

It is going to be very hard to argue with these numbers, Zone H is the repository of many web site and systems defacements or hacks globally. The annual report has become somewhat of a celebrity cause in trying to figure out why we are so bad at securing our systems at the corporate or service level.

In 2007, Linux was hacked some 306 thousand times, while Windows 2003 was hacked only 114 thousand times in the most general of terms. The hacks that Zone H follows are normally mass defacements of web services, so the argument that it is not Linux or Windows can apply, it can be Apache or IIS. There will always be a company apologist somewhere in the lot willing to take on the numbers.

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I spend a lot of my time on the phone with people in New York and London, but am based in San Francisco. What I’d love to have on my Vista machine is a set of clocks on the screen that can show me the time in these other regions, but I can’t add unapproved software to the machine here at work. Solution?

Dave’s Answer:

There is a very elegant solution, actually, and it’s one of the neat little hidden features of Microsoft Windows Vista that - dare I say it? - I really like!

Well, you can’t have multiple “analog” clocks with this little trick, but you can most definitely have multiple digital displays, and even better, they’re neatly hidden until you need to check on the times and make sure you’re not calling too early or late.

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I had this problem before with Windows Media Player 11 (and it seems from searching Google that the problem is widespread) but was hoping someone out there might know how to fix it.

Basically when I try to rip a CD with Windows Media Player 11 it does not populate the album information and metadata. Even when I right click on the album (which shows unknown album when I put it into my PC) and select “Find Album Info” and WMP finds the correct album from their meta data provider, when I click “Finish” and try to apply the metadata it does not get applied to the CD that I’m trying to rip.

This problem happens with all CDs that I try to rip on my brand new Dell PC. I do have “connect to the internet” checked in my settings.

Although I could delete my Windows Media Player folder and try to start over from scratch, I’m hesitant to do this because my media library is large and it takes at least a day to repopulate my library on my PC and another day each for my three XBox 360 extenders.

Does anyone know of a way to force WMP11 to accept the album metadata under the “find album info” command when it won’t accept it?

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As folks know, I bought Vista to run on VMware Fusion on my MacBook Pro. I’d felt it was slow and bloated but I figured I’d give it a good run to really make up my mind. What I like about Vista:

• The UI is nicer than XP. XP always felt like a cartoon and earlier versions of Windows were just… dull.
• The security level actually made me feel more comfortable about the integrity of the O/S. That said, it never alerted me to any suspicious activity or hacking attacks…
• In general, I found the organization of the O/S more intuitive - after the initial learning curve. It felt a bit more “Mac-like” in some indefinable way.
• It is stable. Much more stable than any previous version of Windows I’ve used (and I’ve used every version since 3.1). Apart from reboots for security updates (more on that below), I had Vista up and running for days, even weeks sometimes, just putting the Mac to sleep, switching networks without problems and so on. Rock solid.

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Microsoft Vista has suffered one embarrassing blow after another: people were shunning it, people were returning to XP, and so on.

It seems that Vista is gradually gaining ground, however, and according to a new study, people are somewhat pleased with the results.

CDW’s Windows Vista Tracking Poll found that about 58 percent of “IT decision makers” who were using Vista had either a somewhat or very favorable opinion of it. Another 20 percent of respondents weighed in somewhere within the neutral range of feelings.

Not bad, eh?

These numbers, and the positions of the people surveyed, certainly imply that a lot of upgrades will be taking place, and CDW’s stats seem to back the idea.

The company states, “The final phase of the year-long study finds Windows Vista gaining traction in the mainstream business market, with 48 percent of respondents stating that their organization is using or evaluating Windows Vista - up from 29 percent in the previous poll taken in February 2007 and from 12 percent in the first poll taken in October 2006.”

Vista still doesn’t have a huge fan base, though; there’s no getting around that.

The fact that anyone is impressed by a “using or evaluating” rate of less than 50 percent, and that 22 percent of IT decision makers who are using Vista retain either a somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of it, is not good for Microsoft.

Even less so since Vista is not a new product, and is instead almost a year old.

Also, there’s the recent recommendation of the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency that UK schools not switch to Vista.

Given this split, service packs look likely to remain a turning point in the debate, and fans of XP, Macs, and Linux will continue to have powerful voices.

Microsoft is currently developing Windows Mobile 7, the first revolutionary change to its mobile device operating system. Recently, I was given a document by a source inside Microsoft that details the touch and gesture plans for Mobile 7.

This document is a confidential internal use only document, used to explain the plans for Mobile 7, and contains well over a hundred pages of designs, ideas, and changes to the way we interact with our mobile devices.

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For the last few days, my wife’s PC (that I’m almost done building) wouldn’t go to sleep when I hit the appropriate button on the keyboard. Instead, the screen would fade to black, but the loud fans would keep going and the whole thing would come right back awake the instant I moved the mouse. It took about ten minutes to figure out why this was happening, so if you need a solution, here it is.

If you’ve recently turned on media sharing on your PC (like you recently connected it to an Xbox 360 or other remote media device, or even just messed with the media settings), Windows probably activated “Away Mode” and didn’t bother telling you that. Thanks a lot. Read the rest of this entry »